With onboard NACS, will Tesla V2 stations be available?

[queuewho]

No personal attack: you made a statement about the technical difficulty of a task I have done several times, but which not a whole lot of other people have. Your statement is wrong, in my view, and I am asking whether you are speaking from experience.

I'm saying it's 100% possible, not saying it'd be easy. These are two different things, I think the key here is that they won't do it, and we agree on that.

Sponsored

 

[tls]

Ford would have to, and only if Tesla allows them, create a compatibility mode outside of the NACS specification to operate with the legacy chargers. While I suppose it’s possible, I find it unlikely.

Yes, exactly. And the wire protocol they would have to speak is undocumented outside Tesla and, I have some reason to believe, not exhaustively documented inside Tesla either. Tesla themselves shied away from implementing it on their own Chademo adapter - they taught the cars to speak Chademo over a nonstandard physical layer instead. And Ford would have to do custom hardware development - CCS is spoken over Ethernet-over-power, while the Tesla protocol uses the low voltage signaling lines.

I'm aware of a single 3rd-party attempt to implement this protocol, by the Chinese manufacturer of the unofficial CCS adapters for Tesla that were offered for sale before Tesla put CCS directly in the cars. Their original product used Chademo encapsulation, but that limited charge rate to 50kW. They had alternate firmware that tried to speak the Tesla protocol directly. It was withdrawn very quickly because, I am not kidding, it damaged a couple of charge stations and cars.

I have implemented several obscure communications protocols from scratch, including 3 or 4 in embedded control applications similar to this (but less dangerous). Personally I would not get near this with a 10 foot pole. And note that the extensive architectural differences between Ford's and Tesla's cars mean they definitely cannot just use some implementation Tesla already has.

Tesla will be replacing all V2 chargers with V4 or newer over the next few years. We don’t have a timeframe, but it seems 2027 was dropped as the goal for having eliminated all the V2 hardware. But that was mentioned before the shakeup and restructuring of the Tesla Supercharger team….

The ones it really sucks to not have access to are the "Urban Superchargers" they deploy in gangs of 10-20 in shopping mall garages and the like. If those start supporting CCS, I think that will be the big sign that they're serious about getting all the old hardware upgraded.

There are still many V3 stations that either are not upgraded to support CCS signaling or don't support other manufacturers' cars. If that is because of lack of upgrades, then seeing those open up will help too. If, though, it's because Tesla is intentionally not opening some stations to other CCS cars, that would be a sign that they are not likely to hasten to install CCS capable hardware at v2 sites and certainly not to help any other manufacturer support their old proprietary protocol.

 

[potato]

I don't think personal attacks like this are needed here.

Tesla manufactures cars every day that work with that old standard. If they wanted to implement or allow their older comms on other manufacturers products, they absolutely could. I'm sure it's complex, but that's not the point.

Again, there is no technical reason it couldn't be done. It's an engineering/standards question, and if they don't think it's worth it, they won't.

Pretty sure that wasn't a personal attack. It was just a statement of fact, that yes the technology exists to support a completely different signalling/communication protocol, but it would require additional hardware, software and engineering which might be better spent elsewhere. It's not just flipping a bit in Forscan. And Tesla has not made the V2 protocol public, so legally it's not currently possible.

Big picture it would be much more useful for Tesla to upgrade those old stations to speak CCS than for manufacturers to go out of their way to support an obsolete protocol, even if Tesla allowed it.

 

[queuewho]

Big picture it would be much more useful for Tesla to upgrade those old stations to speak CCS than for manufacturers to go out of their way to support an obsolete protocol, even if Tesla allowed it.

Don't get me wrong here... I'm in 100% agreement on this. It is just I think it is something that could be done, it isn't some impossible feat. The question is should/will the effort be made? No, heck no. Not worth it.

 

[flypony53]

It's technically possible, but I doubt Tesla will share the older proprietary protocol. Even if Tesla does open the proprietary protocol, Ford and others would need to develop the patches to be able to use it and supporting old V2 proprietary Tesla protocols on new NACs vehicles will be pretty low on their list of priorities - especially when it makes them dependent on Tesla to make it work.

Tesla may update (or maybe already have updated) the V2 chargers to support native NACS. If so they wouldn't need to maintain both the old proprietary protocol and the NACs protocol on new vehicles to use all of their SCs. In that case, new NACs vehicles that don't rely on CCS protocols may be able to communicate with the charger but they will only charge if Tesla allows it. It is a big "may" since Tesla would still have to build the integration with the NACs network to support V2 chargers and open it for non-Teslas. It's probably not high on Tesla's priority list either.

Cases in timing and priorities - Look how long it took to get V3/V4 SCs to support CCS. Case 2 - look how long it is taking to get Tesla-supplied NACs adapters. Non-Tesla is a low priority.

I would settle to be able to route to V3/V4 supercharger using onboard navigation 9 months after gaining access. Expecting Ford to write code to bridge a protocol gap is likely a 2030 target that will never be met.

 

[RickKeen]

Tesla walking the tightrope as to how fast they are upgrading. I think some of their motivation is non-technical. They want to keep the advantage that Tesla cars can charge at "ALL" Superchargers and the FUD that other brands might not be able to charge at some locations.

On the other hand, they need to keep Anti-Trust off their case and pretend to be saving the planet by enabling EV industry.

Seems like the perfect balance of semi-cooperation.

 

[MidAtlanticLightningClub]

It's technically possible, but I doubt Tesla will share the older proprietary protocol. Even if Tesla does open the proprietary protocol, Ford and others would need to develop the patches to be able to use it and supporting old V2 proprietary Tesla protocols on new NACs vehicles will be pretty low on their list of priorities - especially when it makes them dependent on Tesla to make it work.

Tesla may update (or maybe already have updated) the V2 chargers to support native NACS. If so they wouldn't need to maintain both the old proprietary protocol and the NACs protocol on new vehicles to use all of their SCs. In that case, new NACs vehicles that don't rely on CCS protocols may be able to communicate with the charger but they will only charge if Tesla allows it. It is a big "may" since Tesla would still have to build the integration with the NACs network to support V2 chargers and open it for non-Teslas. It's probably not high on Tesla's priority list either.

Cases in timing and priorities - Look how long it took to get V3/V4 SCs to support CCS. Case 2 - look how long it is taking to get Tesla-supplied NACs adapters. Non-Tesla is a low priority.

This is correct. It's a problem of language.
v1-v2 Superchargers speak Tesla-ese
v3 and above speak CCS

I don't expect any automaker other than Tesla ever being able to charge on v1-v2 Superchargers.

Sponsored